The protagonist Esther Greenwood is largely based on Sylvia Plath herself. She is a young, aspiring writer who has been given a guest internship at a fashion magazine, and hopes to make it as a poet some day. Unfortunately, Esther is struggling to fight off psychological afflictions that eventually lead to a nervous breakdown. The breakdown that Esther Greenwood experiences in the novel is a portrayal of the breakdown that Plath suffered at age twenty. Esther is completely impaired during her stint with mental illness: barely able to read, speak or think. She is a smart and accomplished woman with a normal exterior, and therefore her breakdown doesn't make much sense.

The novel raises the question of whether happy and healthy living is a matter of choice or fate, and explores if there is any hope for people who swear that they are innately flawed.

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am”, one of the most famous quotes from the novel. Plath phrases things beautifully. The tone of the novel is very consistent too. It maintains a dark vibe with a sense longing for the past.

n  

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

n The Bell Jar is honest, disturbing, powerful, and poignant. It opens with "the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs," as if it were an omen of what is to come. Conspicuous and beautiful, it tells a story of despair as a young woman falls to the pitfalls of depression.
n  

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”

nSylvia Plath's death haunts every page as depair vanquishes life. Was there ever hope for Esther/Sylvia? Perhaps... However, helplessness and doubts drifts all over as a constant companion while she tries to hold to shreds of her life.
n  

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

nSo, there remains a small desire to survive, a desire for freedom to gather strength again to sail with the wind and fly away. And, fragments of realization that we are not alone in our despair.

Sylvia Plath with her superb, alluring and somber writing, holds the reader spellbound and has the power of drawing us into her tale. Her words may hurt, it’s almost impossible not to do so. But Esther/Sylvia also made me laugh with her honest descriptions of the world and the people around her. She made me her accomplice in her hilaraty, in her secrets and in her honesty. Thus, the reader empathizes and is grateful to share with her her pain without appearing miserable or demanding any form of solace.
n  

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

n
The beauty of The Bell Jar, packed with bleak truths, difficult topics and wryly dark humor surprises and teaches us that our sorrows are simply us being human. This uncovering, if nothing else, should make us grateful.
___

Don't be scared.......yeah right.

Esther Greenwood's story actually begins a bit comical describing the details of a free trip to New York City with a group of college girls. While recounting the activities of her strange new friends and blind date disasters, one in particular pertaining to a turkey neck and gizzards gave me a laugh-out-loud moment I will not forget although there's not much else in this terribly depressing novel to bring joy to the reader.

This semi-autobiographical novel was first published in 1963 just before Sylvia Plath ended her incredibly sad life while her two young children slept in the next room, and vividly narrated in this story are the pre-planned details of her first suicide attempt at age 20 in 1953 resulting in an absolute miracle she was ever found alive.

Inside The Bell Jar is not a place you want to be, but Sylvia Plath's convincing writing style will take you on an emotional and scary journey into the 1960's medical world of shock treatments, and give you a descriptive glimpse of the frightening darkness inside the mind of a young woman on her way to complete mental breakdown.

Highly recommend this classic despite the disturbing subject matter.

While I respect Plath for shaking up the literary world, I can’t just slap a “feminist icon” label on her without acknowledging the seriously problematic bits.

I understand everyone has different perspectives on separating the art from the artist, and reading is a personal journey so you do you. For me, in the case of The Bell Jar, the racism was so overt and glaring that it kinda ruined what might have been a beautiful poignant book.

“I looked as yellow as a Chinaman.”

“...I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me of course.”

“He’s from Peru.” “They’re squat,” I said. “They’re ugly as Aztecs.”

“Usually it was a shrunken old white man that brought our food but today it was a negro.... The negro kept grinning and chuckling in a silly way.”

“I drew my foot back and gave him [the “negro”] a sharp hard kick on the calf of his leg.”

While this semi autobiographical fiction has moments of beauty and insight into mental health, I have a problem with the main character physically assaulting a Black man for serving her two varieties of beans and her general dehumanising attitude and depictions on minorities throughout this book.

These aren’t just "product of their time" slip-ups; they’re the author’s not-so-charming worldviews creeping into the story, adding zero value and a whole lot of cringe.

I get that some folks can still enjoy this despite its flaws, but unfortunately, that’s not the case for me.

The Bell Jar is a disturbing and very powerful book chronicling an intelligent young woman's descent into depression and attempted suicide. It has always stood apart in Literature because of the way it closely mirrored the author's experiences.

Knowing that the novel was published in 1971 I was puzzled to find that the prevailing attitudes, culture and mores seemed to date from an earlier time - at least a decade earlier. The main character, Esther, feels suffocated not only by her own feelings of inadequacy and incipient paranoia, but also by the crushingly mundane life she as a female would be expected to follow. Starting off as an intern on a fashion magazine was possibly one of the worst choices she could make, but at this time there were few realistic options.

1950s, I thought, rather than late 60s? And it turns out that yes, it was published under a pseudonym in 1963, a few short months before Sylvia Plath's own suicide at the age of 29.

A very chilling tale indeed. How can one doubt that she knew whereof she wrote.

"I was supposed to be having the time of my life."

This is a powerful and beautifully sad novel. I vaguely remember it from college, but I found it much more meaningful on this reread.

The Bell Jar is the story of Esther Greenwood, a young woman who is struggling with depression and mental illness. She's always gotten good grades at school and has won scholarships, but now she's feeling pressured to choose a career or get married. Esther realizes she doesn't want to do either, so she decides to kill herself.

"I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions."

The novel is structured in flashbacks, and Esther tells us stories from her life in the 1950s. Some of these situations are so amusing that I laughed out loud; others are so sad that it was heartbreaking to remember that this novel was semi-autiobiographical.

The truth is that Sylvia Plath killed herself in February 1963, just a month after this book was published in England. Sylvia writes beautifully, and her descriptions of depression and angst were both poetic and realistic. What I most appreciated about this book was how it seemed like a feminist essay, because Esther felt so suffocated with the few choices allowed to women.

"The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way."

I was also impressed with how relevant this book felt, despite being more than 50 years old. As Frances McCullough wrote in the Foreword: "The issues haven't changed ... The big questions: how to sort out your life, how to work out what you want, how to deal with men and sex, how to be true to yourself and how to figure out what that means — those things are the same today."

I decided to pick up The Bell Jar after reading a heartfelt essay about it in Ann Hood's bookish memoir Morningstar. Hood wrote about how much Sylvia Plath's novel meant to her, and now I understand exactly what she meant. Highly recommended.

Favorite Quotes
"I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."

"All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me."

"I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty."

"I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous."

"I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old."

"I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it."

"I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not."

"I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full."

"Every morning a snowy avalanche of manuscripts swelled the dust-gray piles in the office of the Fiction Editor. Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing."

"I decided to junk the whole honors program and become an ordinary English major. I went to look up the requirements of an ordinary English major at my college. There were lots of requirements, and I didn't have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I'd skipped it."

"The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly ... It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it."

"The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you."

"Lately I had considered going into the Catholic Church myself. I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it. Of course, I didn't believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn't have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent. The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn't take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world."

"I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say 'Fine.'"

"What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb ... A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line."

"I couldn't feel a thing ... wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

“Doctor Gordon was unlocking the closet. He dragged out a table on wheels with a machine on it and rolled it behind the head of the bed. The nurse started swabbing my temples with a smelly grease.

As she leaned over to reach the side of my head nearest the wall, her fat breast muffled my face like a cloud or a pillow. A vague, medicinal stench emanated from her flesh.

‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse grinned down at me. ‘Their first time everybody’s scared to death.’

I tried to smile but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment…Dr. Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.

I shut my eyes.

There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath.

Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done…”
-tSylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

In the early morning hours of February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath sealed her children’s room with masking tape, turned on the gas, and stuck her head in an oven. She was thirty years old.

This is a rather grim way to start a discussion of The Bell Jar, but utterly necessary, because Plath’s death haunts every page of this wonderfully-realized story of a woman descending into insanity. This is one of those instances where fiction and fact are so tightly interwoven that they cannot really be separated. That is, part of the power of The Bell Jar comes from the palpable presence of Plath’s ghost.

Reality casts a funereal pall over the proceedings, yet The Bell Jar opens jauntily enough. “It was a queer, sultry summer,” first-person narrator Esther Greenwood announces in the novel’s arresting first line, “the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs.” Esther, we soon learn, is in New York City, with a prestigious internship at a fashion magazine. There is a certain breeziness in the early going, so that it is not hard to conjure up an image from, say, The Devil Wears Prada: a tale of a young woman on the make, in the city that never sleeps.

As we move forward, however, Esther – who proves an endearing, self-deprecating narrator – struggles with the glitz and glam that others so eagerly seek. Her time in New York is not seamless, and several incidents, ranging from the amusing (there are some surprisingly funny moments) to the terrifying, starts to degrade Esther’s mental condition.

It does not give too much away to say that The Bell Jar is about Esther’s declining mental health. The strength of The Bell Jar, though, is partially derived from the fact that Esther, narrating in the first-person, never comes out and says, “then I went crazy.” Instead, Plath – through Esther – provides a precise, detailed, chilling presentation of Esther’s loss of sanity by describing everything with matter-of-factness. Her psychotic “breaks” are not identified as such. Rather, Esther depicts both the real and the unreal in the exact same manner, so that there is a blurring between the two.

Years ago, as a young defense attorney, I worked the mental health beat, representing indigent clients contesting their civil commitments. Quite unexpectedly, I found it one of the more fascinating and rewarding things I’ve ever done. It was a job you could never plan for, and which could be funny, heartbreaking, and terrifying, all in the space of a few rapidly oscillating minutes in a confined space.

That period gave me a profound awe for the human brain. You are always told how remarkable is the mind, but sometimes you need to see something in relief to see it at all. Thus, in observing the functioning of “non-normal” brain chemistry, I saw the power firsthand. I met with people whose view of the universe was completely at odds with the reality I perceived, and yet they could hold onto this alternate-reality for years, spinning these amazing webs from which they could not break (and of which I sometimes became a part). For these people, it was impossible to detach delusion from non-delusion. The former became as strong as the latter, until the two became the identical sides of the same coin.

That’s what makes the mid-section of The Bell Jar so compelling. It contains Esther's scrupulously-detailed breakdown: a succession of doctors; a mother who doesn't understand and wants her to snap out of it; life in an asylum; electro-shock therapy; insulin therapy; and a black nurse’s aide who feeds her two types of beans, which is the kind of detail that had me nodding my head in recognition. (So much of great fiction is in small, perfect details).

Beyond that, Plath’s Esther is blisteringly honest, and not just about matters of mental health. For instance, there is a scene where Esther loses her virginity that is told with a candor that is surprising today, not to mention the date when it was first published.

As to publication, The Bell Jar became available in Britain – under a pseudonym – in 1963. Just a few months later, Plath took her own life, simultaneously cutting short a promising career, while launching a certain mythos. The novel did not arrive in America for several more years. When it did, it became an instant bestseller, and eventually, a classic. However, like John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, it is a strange classic, inextricably bound up in the death of its creator.

Regardless of its baggage, The Bell Jar could stand on its own. It is poignant, honest, unflinching. The prose is beautiful, touched with poetry. The ending is unforgettable.

But it would be wrong to separate The Bell Jar from its baggage, because the novel and its context inform each other. There is a certain level of sadness here that simply cannot be escaped.

Yet Plath imbues The Bell Jar with glints and glimmers of hope. There is a brief reference to Esther’s future, a future free of hospitals and distortions and demons. It is clear that Esther – and by extension Plath – had some optimism for what lay ahead.

We know, of course, that Plath never reached that better day, but we can wish, even believe, that somehow Esther did.

n  n
The Bell Jar tells us the story of Esther Greenwood, a woman from Boston who comes to live in New York City. Sylvia Plath wrote this novel under the pseudonym Victor Lucas. The author passed away one month after this book was published. The public was eager to find the similarities between Esther Greenwood and Ms. Plath at that time.

Esther's depression and mental breakdown, electroconvulsive therapy, and suicide attempt are all shrewdly depicted by the author. There are multiple instances where the author sharply criticizes the patriarchal society in America at that time. The search for feminine independence is portrayed brilliantly with the help of the extraordinary narrative style. This is one of the best semi-autobiographical novels that I have read.

n  “The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence." n

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world."

I started reading this book at about 3 in the afternoon one day, and by midnight, I had finished it. I have never read something so utterly compelling and literally could not put it down. It was quite terrifying how often I read something the narrator thought or felt and found myself thinking, "I know exactly what you mean."
Also, to all the people who call this a female version of Catcher in the Rye: shut up. You have no idea what you're talking about. Holden Caulfield was a whiny bitch with nothing real to complain about. Esther Greenwood was brilliant, witty, doomed, and had GENUINE reasons to feel like crap about everything. She makes Holden look like a snot-nosed preschooler throwing a tantrum because someone took his crayons.

n  

How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

n
What makes this book so endlessly fascinating is the way Plath layers up meanings: the bell jar is a symbol for her mental illness but it's also an image for the deadening effect of trying to live as a woman with any kind of authenticity under the constraints of patriarchy.

Pressured by the media epitomized by Mademoiselle, by the expectations of a mother who wants her to learn shorthand so she can be a secretary and take down men's letters, and bludgeoned by sexual codes and double standards, Esther's breakdown is almost a fleeing that any sane woman would make. Except there, too, Esther is terrorized and patronized by a sleazy male doctor whose rough electric shock treatment traumatizes her further.

Although this is a novel which clearly draws on Plath's experiences, to see this as autobiography does a disservice to a fiction which is more analytically clear-eyed about power and gender than it is often given credit for. There are few writers so able to combine such harrowing material with dark, dark humour.

And, for Plath, the rhythm of life and freedom is also counted via the feet of iambic poetry: 'I took a deep breath and listened to the old beat of my heart. I am, I am, I am.'
_________________________
Update: July 2019 (original review below)

Given how much I love Plath's poetry and journals, it's been nagging me that this novel of hers didn't work that well for me - it felt flat and 'told' in a monotone, so unlike Plath's usual visceral, high-octane words. Rather than re-reading I listened to the audiobook and wow!, Maggie Gyllenhaal's reading clicked immediately. She captures all the nuances of Esther's voice: the monotone, yes, but also the acid-bite of her wit, the self-deprecating sharpness, the fear of electric shock treatments, the always-on voice of internal censure and criticism, the solipsism - that ended up making this one of the most horrific exposures of patriarchy, the quest for culturally-constructed female perfectionism, and the struggle for self-identity that I've read. Of course, given this novel's placement in the calendar of Plath's life and death, it's impossible to read it 'innocently' - but yes, I *knew* this would be a book for me if only I could find a way in.
--------------------------------------------

n  

I am I am I am

n
As much as I love Plath, her poetry and her journals, this novel has never worked for me. I first read it as a teenager, and it was my first introduction to Plath’s writing and, even then, I was underwhelmed. I wondered if re-reading it now in the light of her poetry would change my response – but no, this still feels weak and slightly unfinished or unrealised.

Drawing on Plath’s internship at a NY magazine and her subsequent breakdown, we can certainly see the themes of her writings beneath the contours of the story: the tension between what a woman is supposed socially and culturally to be and her internal realities; ambition and writing; the power plays of sex and desire; the ego vs. the ‘nice’ girl. And from the start there’s something subtly ‘off’ about Esther’s voice, a casual, nagging, wrongness that alerts us to the fact that this is not going to follow traditional paths or end happily.

All the same, for a writer with such a powerful, bruising, harsh and dynamic style of wordcraft, even in her journals, this feels a little bland. It’s always worth a read especially if poetry, Plath’s true medium, isn’t your thing but it’s not a text that showcases Plath at her exciting, energetic, painful and corrosive best.

Fuck you and that fig tree

Racism (and homophobia) is where I draw the line.


Let me preface this review by saying that I've read "Boy Parts" by Eliza Clark and most of the work of Ottessa Moshfegh AND I LOVED THOSE BOOKS. Call me basic, but those are some of my favorite books of all time.
In other words, I love the "insane women" genre. Not even my physical copies are all the same size (which I hate) so how can I even think to fit the contents of completely different books with completely different storylines in the same genre shelf?
Yeah, I hate to put labels on books and the "insane women" narrative quite frankly drives ME insane, but here we are.
You can't tell me you haven't seen The Bell Jar alongside previously mentioned books at least one time in your life, recommended as a "female rage" book or something of that connotation!

However, call it how you want, but I like my books a tad bit crazy, and this delivered that, A LOT.
And not in a good way.
I mentioned my disliking of this book in the updates already, but let me try to be coherent for a second.
First of all, this is not feminism, in any way. Out of 300 pages, this book had 2-3 feminist pages, rest was just pure HATRED. Can you call yourself a feminist if you bring down black people, Asian people, overweight people, mothers, students, bodies of dead people?
I understand that the MC suffers from depression and that's the whole point of the book, but from what I see on the Internet, the author wasn't very different from her character, at least in that aspect. Many people think that this book was "ahead of its time" blablabla, BUT, honestly, it wasn't written that long ago to be this ignorant. People can have other characteristics aside from the color of their skin, and writers knew that CENTURIES ago.

The story had a 3 star plot (to me) and I would rate it three stars, but I give three stars to solid books I had good time reading. This wasn't one of those. It had me closing the book (and almost throwing it across the room) every now and then.
Some parts were good, and then BOOM, more racism.
Thinking about that now, maybe even 2 stars is generous.
The ending was also very disappointing, basically no message came across.
Writing was very beautiful, Sylvia Plath has a wonderful way of describing situations and emotions, but that poetic vessel was wasted on this hot mess. I didn't write down a single thing (and writing down quotes is usually my routine)
I don't want to talk about characters because there's nothing to talk about.


Without being dramatic, I'm so sad that this book is THIS popular and wide-spread nowadays, and an influence to so many young women. We can be feminists without being THIS hateful, or if hatred is needed, it can be pointed to population groups that actually put us down. DO BETTER